Isobel Allen
Emeritus Professor of Health and Social Policy
i.allen@psi.org.uk

doctors' careers and the organisation of the medical workforce; family planning; terminations of pregnancy; teenage pregnancies; older people; interface between health and social care; health care of homeless people; community care; residential care of older people; evaluation; maternity services.

Sarah Bell
Research Officer
S.Bell5@wmin.ac.uk

Sarah joined PSI in February 2008 and is currently working on three projects; the Sustainable Development Research Network, the Green Fiscal Commission and Bridging Research and Policy Through Outcome Evaluation. Sarah studied Biological Sciences as an undergraduate at Oxford University, specialising in natural resources and the environment. She subsequently completed an MSc in Practising Sustainable Development at Royal Holloway University, through which she was able to examine the influences of a range of socio-economic factors on the natural environment. She is interested in exploring mechanisms that may facilitate evidence-based policy-making, with a particular focus on policies relating to climate change, energy, biodiversity and sustainable consumption and production.

Helen  Bewley
Senior Research Fellow
h.bewley@psi.org.uk

Helen’s main research interests are industrial relations, and work-life balance. She uses both quantitative and qualitative research techniques. Helen was a member of the research team which carried out the primary analysis of the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey and has extensive experience of using linked datasets. Prior to joining the Institute, Helen worked on the Future of Trade Unions Programme at the London School of Economics. Her first research position was at the University of Surrey.

Sheere Brooks
Research Officer
s.brooks@psi.org.uk

Sheere’s main research interests include labour market interventions and the performance and involvement of minority ethnic groups in the UK and EU labour markets. She is currently working on three DWP labour market evaluation studies.

She also has an interest in developmental issues pertaining to tourism development, poverty alleviation and the administration of HIV and AIDS prevention programmes in the Caribbean region. She is currently completing PhD research in the Social Policy department at the London School of Economics & Political Science.

Alex Bryson
Research Director
a.bryson@psi.org.uk

Alex has been at the institute since 1991, during which time his research has focused on the evaluation of welfare-to-work programmes and industrial relations. Recently he has been applying techniques common in the evaluation literature to problems in industrial relations. He is the Manpower Fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance, an editor of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, and a member of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills

View Alex Bryson's CV, including his publications listed by type, here.

Lorenzo Cappellari
Visiting Research Fellow
lorenzo.cappellari@unicatt.it

Lorenzo is currently associate professor of economics, Facoltà di Economia, Università Cattolica, Milano. His research interests are labour economics, income distribution and dynamics, economics of education, and microeconometrics

Read Lorenzo's full CV [pdf]

Gabriel Chanan
Visiting Research Fellow

Gabriel Chanan is Co-Director of Research and Policy at the Community Development Foundation. He has been a leading adviser to government on community engagement and involvement, and for most of the last three years has worked in the government’s Community Empowerment Division (in the Department of Communities and Local Government; formerly the Civil Renewal Unit in the Home Office). His focus has been especially on establishing indicators of community participation in the new Local Government Performance Framework, and on the forthcoming duty to involve local residents in local authority functions.

Olivia Chassais
Research Officer
o.chassais@psi.org.uk

Olivia joined PSI in March 2008 and is currently working on sustainable development indicators, on the Indi-link project of the European Commission. Previously, she completed a traineeship at the European Commission. She worked at the Secretariat General on the EU Strategy for Sustainable Development in the 'Strategic Objective Solidarity' D2 Unit and she was given major responsibilities for consultation on 'Social reality'.

Richard Dorsett
Research Director
r.dorsett@psi.org.uk

Richard first came to PSI in 1997 and since then has focused primarily on the quantitative evaluation of labour market programmes. He has led a number of large-scale UK evaluations employing a range of analytical techniques. Current projects include two random assignment experiments..

Simon Dresner
Research Fellow
s.dresner@psi.org.uk

Simon's expertise is in the social and economic aspects of sustainability. His book The Principles of Sustainability was published by Earthscan in 2002. In the area of environmental taxation, he coordinated an EC research project on social responses to ecological tax reform policies (PETRAS) and worked on a project about ways to remove regressivity from environmental taxes. He is now doing research on public attitudes for the Green Fiscal Commission. He is also working on public attitudes to hydrogen. He has done extensive work on household energy use.

Tim Edwards
PSI Administrator
edwardt@psi.org.uk

Responsible for the overall management of PSI offices and support services.

Francesca Francavilla
Research Fellow
f.francavilla@psi.org.uk

Francesca joined the PSI Employment research group in January 2008 as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining the PSI, she worked as Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Florence (Italy), where she previously obtained a PhD in Development Economics.

Her most recent research involved the analysis of the relationship between mother and child labour and the causal relationship between poverty and fertility in less developed countries. She worked as consultant for international agencies such as UNICEF and WHO and joined the Understanding Children's Work project (ILO, UNICEF and the World Bank inter-agency research project), and the MONEE project (MONitoring Eastern Europe project).

Her main research interests include labour economics, child labour, and poverty reduction. She also has an interest in applied microeconomics and experimental economics. She is currently working on Pathways to work: evaluation of the IB reform pilots.

Getinet Haile
Research Fellow
haileg@psi.org.uk

Getinet Joined the Employment research group of the PSI in September 2005, as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining PSI, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Employment Research of the Westminster Business School (2005), as a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Economics, Lancaster University (2002 - 2004) and as a Teaching assistant at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham (1999 - 2002). He had also worked as Lecturer (1998 - 1999), as assistant Lecturer (1995 - 1996) and as Graduate Assistant (1994 - 1995) at the Department of Economics, Addis Ababa University before his career in the UK.

His main research interests are applied labour economics, programme evaluation, issues of labour market adjustment, labour market mobility and development economics. He has worked on a number of large scale quantitative evaluation and/or labour market projects recently including the labour market transition among the over-50s, evaluation of the impact of Pathways to work and evaluation of the impact of work focused interviews for partners. Getinet has a long experience of working with large scale survey and administrative datasets

Mayer Hillman
Senior Fellow Emeritus
mayer.hillman@blueyonder.co.uk

energy conservation; walking and cycling; road safety; climate change; health promotion; quality of life issues; environmental and resource sustainability; green economics; children's physical and social development; setting clocks forward.

Lesley Hoggart
Senior Research Fellow
l.hoggart@psi.org.uk

Lesley joined PSI from Middlesex University in January 2004. Her recent research has focused on sexual and reproductive health, in particular that of young people; and welfare to work evaluations. She also has research experience in family planning, termination of pregnancies, maternal health and refugees and asylum-seekers.

She specialises in qualitative research and process evaluations of randomised controlled trials. She is currently working on a Department for Work and Pensions-funded project on employment retention and advancement (ERA); a Government for London funded project on teenage abortions and repeat abortions in London; and a Department for Children Schools and Families funded evaluation of the London Student Pledge.

Maria Hudson
Senior Research Fellow
m.hudson@psi.org.uk

Maria joined PSI in 2002 and her research has largely focused on labour market disadvantage and inequalities, with particular reference to minority ethnic groups. An experienced qualitative researcher she has an interest in inter-disciplinary and mixed method approaches to engaging with social issues, and comparative research.

Maria’s most recently completed projects explored claimant and employer experiences of race discrimination claims, social cohesion in diverse communities experiencing new immigration, and labour market programmes for vulnerable groups. Maria has previously held research posts in the Industrial Relations Research Unit at Warwick Business School and the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University. Her PhD thesis looked at the experiences of disabled people in community based work projects and paid work in Newham and Salford.

Diana Kasparova
Senior Research Fellow
d.kasparova@psi.org.uk

In the UK, Diana’s career started at the University of Glasgow where her research focused on the areas of housing economics and finance and the interrelationship between housing and the economy. Her PhD thesis investigated possible consequences of the adoption of the euro for five European housing markets.

In 2002, Diana moved to PSI and since then her work has additionally covered the areas of social policy and labour market research, focusing on evaluations of different welfare-to-work initiatives and studies into families with children. Diana’s latest projects assess the feasibility of estimating the take-up rate of Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance. In housing, her current research examines issues of housing supply, housing affordability and earnings distribution. She advises the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU) on the operation of the Affordability Model. Diana is a member of CLG’s Housing Markets and Planning Analysis panel of experts and a research associate at the International Centre for Housing and Urban Economics at University of Reading Business School.

Genevieve Knight
Quantitative Group Manager
g.knight@psi.org.uk

Genevieve is an applied economist/econometrician, with a quantitative emphasis. Her main field of interest is evaluation of policy programs and the labour market. Her chief skills are with econometric modeling, and handling complex data. However, she also conducts cost-benefit analysis , and systematic literature and evidence reviews. She has previously specialised in macroeconometrics and time series at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, worked on various academic research projects, and undertaken microeconometric panel analysis of the cost of job loss with Paul Gregg and Jonathan Wadsworth at the Centre for Economic Performance LSE. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney, Australia, had an Overseas Research Studentship, with the London School of Economics, and completed her doctoral thesis on the topic Evaluation of the Australian Wage Subsidy: Special Youth Employment and Training Program, SYETP.

At PSI, she first worked on the DSS project 'Self-employment and pensions', with the Employment Service on the New Deal for Young People quantitative evaluation, as well as working on the New Deal for Scotland quantitative evaluation with the Scottish Executive, the Joint Claims evaluation, the Macro evaluation of NDYP, and benchmarking of NDYP for the NAO. Recent work has been with the DWP projects for the Joint Claims Extension working with the quantitative survey, and the administrative data analysis of Lone Parent Work Focused Interviews (Personal Adviser Meetings) using difference in differences. An interesting application of multiple treatment propensity score matching techniques was undertaken in the secondary analyses of NDLP and LPWFI, while hazard analysis was applied in analysing the In Work Benefit Calculation for lone parents. An extensive literature and methods review was undertaken to collect together methods and evidence for Evaluating the Working for Families policy project (New Zealand Ministry of Social Development).

She is leading the Evaluation of Childcare Taster Pilots and Extended Schools Childcare Pilot (DfES), and is part of the team for the In Work Credit and lone parent pilots evaluation, the Pathways to Work Incapacity Benefit Pilots Evaluation, and the Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration Evaluation, which are for the Department for Work and Pensions.

Jenny Lau
Research Administrator
j.lau@psi.org.uk

Robert Lyons
Website Administrator
r.lyons@psi.org.uk

Karen Mackinnon
Research Fellow
k.mackinnon@psi.org.uk

Data preparation, analysis and large-scale data management. Karen has considerable experience of handling complex data sets such as the Family Resources Survey and Youth Cohort Study.

Alan Marsh
Emeritus Professor
a.marsh@psi.org.uk

• the relationship between social and economic change and social policy, and
• the evaluation of social policy both in general and in quasi-experimental pilots.

Neil Mcenery West
Research Administrator (Finance)
mcenerne@psi.org.uk

Kate McGeevor
Research Fellow
k.mcgeevor@psi.org.uk

Kate joined PSI in July 2005. She is Network Coordinator of the Sustainable Development Research Network (SDRN), which works closely with academics and policy-makers to encourage evidence-based policy-making. At present, she is also on part-time secondment to Defra's Environmental Behaviours Unit as a Social Science Research Manager. Among other things, Kate has recently worked on a Strategic Review of Sustainable Development in Higher Education for HEFCE, and a review for Defra of a series of projects focused on sustainable consumption. Kate studied Geography as an undergraduate in Manchester and completed an MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Policy at Oxford University. Her research interests include the public's understanding of sustainability issues, pro-environmental behaviour, local food systems, and environmental education.

Andrew McIntosh
Visiting Research Fellow

Andrew McIntosh was Minister for the Media and Heritage at the Department for Culture Media and Sport from 2003 to 2005. His responsibilities included broadcasting and press regulation, heritage and architecture, libraries, and gambling regulation. He was also spokesman in the House of Lords for HM Treasury from 1997-2005.

Geoffrey Meen
Visiting Research Fellow
g.p.meen@reading.ac.uk

Geoffrey Meen has over 20 years experience of working in housing economics and related fields. He is currently Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Reading and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a former Head of the Economics Department at Reading and Director of Research for the University’s Business School. Geoffrey is also currently UK Director of the International Centre for Housing and Urban Economics. He was awarded an OBE in the 2007 New Years Honours List for Services to Social Housing and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the same year. He is also a Fellow of the Weimer School of Advanced Studies in Real Estate and Land Economics, Florida.

His research interests are in applied econometrics, economic analysis of housing markets at different spatial levels from the national through to the local, and the economics of segregation and deprivation.

Nazmiye Ozkan
Research Fellow
n.ozkan@psi.org.uk

Nazmiye has been a Research Fellow with the PSI Environment Group since February 2005. Prior to joining PSI, she worked as a Post-doctoral researcher at the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her main research interests include integration of environment, economy and energy models; quantitative modelling of environmental problems; and analysis of regional development and policies. Nazmiye holds a PhD in Regional Planning from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Joan Phillips
Research Fellow
j.phillips@psi.org.uk

Joan joined PSI in January 2004 as a qualitative research fellow.  Prior to joining PSI, she was a postdoctoral Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Reading.  Joan has undertaken qualitative research on a range of substantive areas including gender, race and ethnicity, development, Caribbean return migration and sex work in tourism. 

Joan's past research projects include an investigation into the social dynamics of young return migration to the Caribbean, bar girl prostitution in Bangkok and the relationship between black masculinity and beach boy prostitution in Barbados.

Kathryn Ray
Research Fellow
k.ray@psi.org.uk

Kath joined PSI in Jan 2004 and is a sociologist with research interests in labour market disadvantage, social exclusion, gender and work/ life balance, race equality policies and identity. She specialises in qualitative research methods and is particularly interested in biographical and narrative research methods.

Prior to joining PSI, Kath completed a PhD at Manchester University looking at local authority race equality policies, community development work, and identities among South Asian women. She has subsequently undertaken research on social networks and political participation; and on gender, childcare and work/ life balance, comparing the experiences of women in different class positions in neighbourhoods of Manchester and London.

Mark Rickinson
Visiting Research Fellow

Dr Mark Rickinson is a research consultant with a particular interest in the environment who specialises in educational research and evaluation, research reviews and research training (www.markrickinson.co.uk). He is currently leading an Anti-Bullying Development & Research (D&R) Project with Coventry City Council and recently completed two projects for the European Commission on Evidence-based Policy and Practice in Education and Training. He also works as a Senior Research Associate at the Young Foundation and is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University Department of Education. Previously he spent several years as a Senior Research Officer at the National Foundation for Educational Research.

Malcolm Rigg
Director, Policy Studies Institute
m.rigg@psi.org.uk

Malcolm joined PSI as Director in October 2004. He was previously Managing Director of the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). Before joining BMRB he was Director of Research at COI Communications and has also been Head of Public Interest Research at Consumers' Association (now Which?). Earlier in his career he was a Senior Research Fellow at PSI.

Melahat Sahin-Dikmen
Research Fellow
sahindm@psi.org.uk

Melahat joined PSI in January 2002 after completing an MSc in Social Research Methods at the LSE. Her Masters dissertation was on socio-economic polarisation within ethnic minorities and was based on the case of the first generation Indians in the UK.

At PSI, she is a member of the Employment Group. Her interests include labour market disadvantage with reference to ethnic minorities; immigrants and refugees; poverty; income inequality; economic exclusion; and political participation.

Sergio Salis
Research Fellow
S.Salis@psi.org.uk

Sergio joined the PSI Employment research group in January 2008 as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining the PSI, he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET) of the London Metropolitan University and as a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cagliari (Italy), where he previously obtained a PhD in Economics. His main research interests include development economics, industrial relations and applied microeconomics.

His most recent research involved the econometric analysis of the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2004 in order to study the relationship between human resources management practices and workplace productivity. Sergio’s previous research mainly focussed on foreign direct investment and economic growth in developing countries. He also employed evaluation techniques to measure the causal effect of foreign acquisition on firm productivity.

Curriculum vitae [pdf]

Roger Salmons
Visiting Research Fellow
r.salmons@wmin.ac.uk

Roger is an environmental economist with significant experience of applying economic analysis to the design and evaluation of environmental policy, having spent over ten years as a researcher at PSI and CSERGE at University College London. During this time he worked on collaborative research projects with organisations throughout Europe and was a member of the European Research Network on Market-Based Instruments for Sustainable Development and the European Research Network on Tradable Emission Permits. His main areas of interest and expertise relate to the evaluation of environmental policies and measures; the design and evaluation of economic instruments; environmental policy and economic performance.

In addition to his research activities, Roger has acted as an expert consultant to Defra, the Environment Agency, OECD and the European Commission. More recently, he has worked in the consultancy sector, as Technical Director for the Environmental Economics Team at Jacobs Engineering UK. He also has previous senior management experience in the commercial sector, having spent eleven years working for a leading UK retail company.

Hilary Salter
Research Administrator
h.salter@psi.org.uk

Ben Shaw
Senior Research Fellow and Acting Group Head
b.shaw@psi.org.uk

Ben joined PSI in October 2006 and since then has worked on projects investigating innovation, eco-innovation, environmental tax reform and the links between research and policy outcomes. He is one of the co-ordinators of the Defra/DfT funded Sustainable Development Research Network (SDRN) and manages the secretariat for the Green Fiscal Commission.

His current projects include: Green Fiscal Commission which is looking at greening the UK tax system; ECODRIVE, a collaborative European Commission funded research project intended to develop indicators of eco-innovation; Bridging Research and Policy Through Outcome Evaluation for Defra (with Technopolis and the Centre for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice) which is exploring the links between research and policy through the use and development of outcome evaluation techniques; Resource productivity, ETR and sustainable growth in Europe (PETRE) which is intended to generate new insights into the conditions for sustainable economic growth, and how this might be promoted through public policy.

Prior to joining PSI in October 2006 Ben was Principal Policy Adviser at Green Alliance. His work there mainly focused on national level strategic policy development in the areas of waste, resource and product policy but also included projects on the role of negotiated agreements in UK environmental policy and sustainable consumption.

Jim Skea
Research Director, UK Energy Research Centre
jim.skea@ukerc.ac.uk

Jim was Director of PSI from November 1998 to September 2004, and now acts as Research Director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). He is also a founding member of the Committee on Climate Change. Jim is physically located at the UKERC HQ at Imperial College and all correspondence should be sent there. His main research interests are: energy/environmental policies; sustainable development; climate change; environmental regulation and technical change; and business and environment issues more generally.

Deborah Smeaton
Senior Research Fellow
d.smeaton@psi.org.uk

Deborah's research experience spans a variety of areas including gender studies, self employment, older workers, the retired and change in the workplace.

Recent projects  include two ESRC funded studies under the Future of Work program. The first was designed to identify and investigate changes in the employment relationship over the past 20 years. The second investigated change in employer practices. Other recent projects for the JRF and DWP include job transitions among the over 50s and continuing to work beyond state pension age.

Her current projects are Employment after Childbirth, an ESRC funded project and Charitable Giving, an Inland Revenue sponsored survey exploring charitable donations by individuals and their use of tax efficient schemes.

Derek Smith
Visiting Fellow

Derek has been a Visiting Research Fellow at PSI since October 2003. His principal areas of research are on the business impact of environmental policy, and on sustainable consumption and production, including the issue of product-related policy. He is currently the Director of a consultancy specialising in public policy analysis and evaluation. Prior to this, he worked for 13 years at Ernst & Young, in the Sustainable Development group and on risk management and assurance.

Derek's recent research has included:

• a systematic review of the drivers, barriers and incentives for resource productivity, undertaken for the UK DTI;
• a review of the extent and adequacy of UK government spending on environmental protection in the context of the 2004 public spending round;
• an analysis of UK energy efficiency policies and programmes as part of an independent evaluation carried out for DEFRA, focusing on public sector programmes and targets;
• a review of the market impacts and competitiveness impacts of sustainable procurement policies and targets;
• reviews for the European Commission and the UK government on the development of product oriented environmental policy, including consideration of the role of instruments to create markets and drive green product innovation ;
• a review for the European Commission into the adoption by industry of life cycle approaches and its implications for competitiveness and trade.

Vivienne Stiemens
Librarian
v.stiemens@psi.org.uk

Most of Vivienne's experience has been in academic and research libraries;  early in her career she specialised in MARC/AACR cataloguing, and worked for a time as a consultant in this field.

BA, DipLib, MSc (Econ)
Chartered member of CILIP, and Accredited indexer (Society of Indexers).

Rebecca Taylor
Research Fellow
r.taylor@psi.org.uk

Rebecca is a qualitative researcher who joined PSI in February 2002. Prior to that she had been completing her PhD on voluntary work at Essex University and working as a research assistant at South Bank University on an  ESRC funded project exploring young people's transitions to adulthood.  Rebecca's research interests include: conceptual understandings of work, particularly how  voluntary work, informal economic activity  and other forms of non standard work can be incorporated into theoretical frameworks;  experiences of work for socially excluded groups such as refugees; localised community based work practices; young people and youth transitions into work; the intersection of social class, work and culture; methodological issues relating to qualitative data collection and analysis, and the use of software packages such as QSR Nvivo.

Stephen Tindale
Visiting Research Fellow

Stephen was previously Executive Director of Greenpeace UK and Chair of Greenpeace Europe in Brussels. Before that he was Special Adviser to Michael Meacher when he was Environment Minister. Prior to that, he was Head of Environment at IPPR. He has published short books (through IPPR) on Green Tax Reform and energy policy.

Sandra Vegeris
Senior Research Fellow
s.vegeris@psi.org.uk

Sandra joined PSI in 2001 and was promoted to senior researcher in 2005. Her expertise draws from 15 years research experience in social policy and programme evaluation, with an emphasis on multi-methods approaches. Her research interests encompass: labour market interventions, poverty and disadvantaged groups, citizen participation in governance, and measures that promote quality of life in later life.

Michael White
Emeritus Fellow
m.white@psi.org.uk

Michael White joined PSI in 1979 after working in industry and management research and teaching. In 1986 he founded the Employment Studies Group and was its Head until 1994.

His studies have included three national surveys of unemployment, and many evaluations of government labour market programmes, including the Restart Cohort Study, and the Macro evaluation of New Deal for Young People. He took part in the ESRC's Social Change and Economic Life Initiative (1986-91), was co-director of the Employment in Britain survey (1992), and was involved in the ESRC's "Future of Work" programme, leading the Working in Britain in the Year 2000 survey. He has also carried out several projects on lone mothers, employment and childcare issues and has a particular interest in working time and work-life balance.

He is an Associate Member (Sociology) of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a member of the Editorial Board of Work, Employment and Society.

In 2005 he was awarded an OBE for services to labour market policy.